Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape: A study of three communities

Chapter 1

Introduction

In 1311, the clerk of the Lakenheath manorial court enrolled a charter detailing a lease between the prior of Ely and Richard, son of Richard in the Lane for all the demesne fisheries of Lakenheath for a ten-year period in return for annual rent of £13 10s. In the agreement, the prior retained his right to half the bitterns and all the pike of a certain size, as was his prerogative as lord of the manor. For his part, Lane acquired access to the appurtenant weirs and fens, alongside the rights to eighteen courses for fishing boats on the water of wendilse, and the custody of the lord’s swans. During this period, Lakenheath fisheries were interchangeably described as fens, and almost fifty are detailed in the manorial records. The demesne fisheries would have comprised a small proportion of this number, but, nevertheless, the grant clearly gave Lane rights over a significant acreage of demesne resources.¹ Three years later, an inquisition post mortem valued Lakenheath’s Clare fee fisheries at £1.² It is possible to draw from this that in 1311 Richard in the Lane had access to a greater and more valuable expanse of one of Lakenheath’s key seigneurial assets than did Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester and one of England’s leading magnates. However, in stark contrast to de Clare, Richard in the Lane was a servile peasant, legally bound to the prior’s manor of Lakenheath.

Within this one brief example it is possible to find – in concentrated form – all of the elements that form the principal lines of enquiry followed within this volume. Leasing demesne resources to peasants was not, of course, unprecedented, and in some respects this agreement is unremarkable. Given, however, that certain seigneurial assets, including fisheries, parks, gardens, dovecotes and warrens, were strongly associated with lordship – in actuality and within contemporary literature and illuminations – it reveals a dichotomy between the way lords perceived their rural resources and the practical realities of managing the rural environment, as outlined in chapter two.³ Despite images showing peasants occupying their rightful place in lords’ fields, as they do in the Luttrell Psalter, while absent from strictly seigneurial spaces, Richard in the Lane junior’s lease of the Lakenheath fisheries dispenses with the myth perpetuated by elites that the local environment was characterised by clear divisions between lordly and peasant space. At the same time, Lane cannot be considered an archetypal peasant in this respect: not all Lakenheath peasants had authorised access to demesne resources. Nevertheless, as chapter three shows, authorisation was not always sought by peasants traversing their local landscape. Considering the size and value of the fisheries he leased, Lane’s status is noteworthy, complementing the analysis of rural social hierarchies that forms the focus of chapter four. The fishery named in the lease – wendilse – reminds us that the rural landscape of medieval England was a patchwork of named places, and that these names had been devised by those who knew it best – the resident peasants. The great importance of the named environment to peasant culture is considered in chapter five. As a servile individual, Lane would have been aware that the details relating to his lease would have been documented by the clerk of the manorial court, creating a permanent record of the transaction. Although they were increasingly drawn to written court records in the later medieval period as an aide-mémoire, the written word was generally untypical of the means through which peasants remembered important events, as outlined in chapter six. The Lakenheath fisheries were clearly an important aspect of Lane’s economic wellbeing, and the peasant economy forms the focus for chapter seven. Finally, the lease provides an insight into the ways in which both landscape and resources were managed in the rural environment, and this forms the key consideration for chapter eight.

The study of the medieval rural environment and its inhabitants is at an exciting crossroads. In recent years, landscape archaeologists and historical geographers have begun to turn their attention away from a focus on the physical environment in which debates concerning form and function have dominated the scholarly discourse. Similarly, social and economic historians, formerly preoccupied with comparisons between medieval and modern productivity, have started thinking about rural England and its inhabitants from new perspectives. Today, a growing number of scholars from all these disciplines are concentrating on uncovering the experiences of those living in rural settlements, as Sally Smith outlines: ‘focus[ing] on the people who occupied the landscape … explor[ing] the complex webs of social relationships in which they operated, and … try[ing] to … enquire into the practices of living in the medieval settlement and the meanings thus invoked and revoked’.⁴ Increasingly, scholars following this line of enquiry take an interdisciplinary approach to the challenge of revealing the lived experiences of late medieval rural dwellers. As Matthew Johnson has suggested, in order to approach the rural landscape in this way it is necessary to introduce a range of contextual information allowing us to respond to the complexities of elucidating the human experience of past societies.⁵ This requires us not only to draw upon a vast array of sources, including documents, material culture, place-names and the landscape itself, but to explore the approaches adopted by a wide variety of academic disciplines, including onomastics, anthropology, ethnography, landscape archaeology, history and historical geography. It was in this spirit that the Medieval Settlement Research Group recently convened a series of workshops resulting in the report ‘Perceptions of Medieval Landscape and Settlement’.⁶ Other academic networks subsequently established have followed broadly the same intellectual path; particularly noteworthy in this context was the 2009 collaboration between the universities of Leicester, Nottingham and Durham in assembling a group of interdisciplinary scholars to investigate the sense of place in Anglo-Saxon England.⁷

This open approach adopted by many scholars of the rural environment has been marked by a growing body of interdisciplinary work in which the emphasis has shifted away from a narrow focus on the physical environment to a more anthropic view that places human experience at the centre of the equation – in a sense, ‘repopulating’ the rural landscape. Archaeologists are now concerned to move beyond the materiality of rural settlements to consider the experiences of those residing there. This ranges from how the built environment and its environs were perceived by those encountering it to a more anthropological focus on the human experience of dwelling and working in rural settlements.⁸ In many instances, this new focus extends beyond the residential core and out into the surrounding fields and the wider landscape.⁹ Landscape archaeologists are not alone in this endeavour, and researchers from a range of disciplines have contributed to scholarship on this subject, with many taking an interdisciplinary approach. To date, various themes have been investigated, including the medieval economy,¹⁰ ways of living in the rural environment,¹¹ ways of organising the landscape of the rural settlement,¹² ways of moving through the landscape,¹³ and considerations of ritual and religion.¹⁴

This interdisciplinary study is situated within this emerging scholarly context and assesses a wide range of source material to consider peasant perspectives on the medieval landscape between c.1086 and c.1348. Through a detailed evaluation of three rural settlements – Elton in Huntingdonshire, Castor in Northamptonshire and Lakenheath in Suffolk – this study examines the myriad ways in which the lower orders of society regarded the familiar landscapes in which they lived and worked. Beginning with an assessment of seigneurial perspectives on the rural environment, chapter two takes us from the later Anglo-Saxon period into the fourteenth century, evaluating the evolution of elite aspects of settlement and landscape and the establishment and development of a lordly presence there. This not only helps to demonstrate the ways in which lords viewed rural settlement but also provides insights into how they thought about the resident community. Chapter three follows on from this to consider the organisation of the settlement, beginning with an assessment of the placement of each respective manorial curia and its proximity to peasant dwellings. Issues of privacy and ownership are considered, leading us to reflect on the regulation of movement through the settlement and its wider landscape through an analysis of how locals chose to navigate their way through their environment. Chapter four continues to explore socially constructed ideas of place through an examination of topographical bynames and family names – such as atte grene – that closely linked particular families with their local environment. In particular, it focuses on why these names were most commonly associated with servile individuals and seeks to explain this phenomenon through a more detailed analysis of Huntingdonshire.

Chapter five then turns more fully to the landscape surrounding the settlement, examining the naming practices adopted by medieval communities using microtoponyms – field-names and other minor landscape names. As these names are generally considered to have been coined by peasants, their importance as a key source cannot be underestimated. It is possible to detect differences in the naming strategies selected by different communities, and the conceivable reasons for this are explored in detail. While this chapter focuses largely on the apparent transparency of landscape names, chapter six offers a detailed case study of a small part of Castor’s landscape, drawing on field-names, documents and material culture to emphasise the prominent role that the landscape played as a repository for local legend and folklore. Here, field-names with seemingly straightforward meanings are revealed as having had a potentially more important function in preserving local collective memory. Thus, this chapter offers a cautionary note that field-names are not always unambiguous, and that contextual analysis can reveal meaning that has long since been obscured.

Chapter seven turns toward what might be seen as a more traditional focus – especially for social and economic historians – on the agrarian economy. Its position in the volume does not reflect its lack of importance, but simply emphasises that it is one of a range of themes that have equal standing in a study of this nature. Following a brief overview of each respective demesne enterprise, the documentary records are scrutinised for insights into peasant economies. Various means through which the local environment afforded local peasants a livelihood are examined. Naturally, this leads us to consider arable operations, but, in the settlements under review, sheep farming and fishing were also important economically and are also assessed in detail. Finally, chapter eight contemplates the management of the landscape and examines three specific environments that are important in each case study location: arable, meadow and fenland, considering the strategies that peasants adopted to maximise the potential that these resources had to offer.

Overall, this is a book that aspires to demonstrate that the recovery of peasant perspectives on the environments in which they lived and worked is a realistic and attainable goal. Using largely overlooked evidence, such as field-names and family names, and considering familiar sources – like manorial documents – in new ways, this research reveals how far it is possible to uncover peasants’ attitudes toward the English rural landscape. This approach – toward a peasant-centric historical enquiry into the rural environment – coupled with an integration between historical methodologies and those adopted within cognate disciplines, has allowed a greater focus on medieval peasant mentalities than has hitherto been attempted. Thus, the themes explored within this book are a first concerted effort to unveil something of the mentalities of a group of people who were fundamental to the economic success of later medieval England.

Geographic scope

At the heart of this volume is a comparative study of three rural medieval settlements: Elton in Huntingdonshire, Castor in Northamptonshire and Lakenheath in Suffolk (Figure 1.1).¹⁵ These places were selected on a range of criteria: they feature varied geographic, economic and social contrasts, and they are each well documented for the period under review, c.1086–1348. Castor is additionally noteworthy because its church, constructed between the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, features contemporary sculpture, and this has been included within the range of source material assessed. Both Elton and Castor are situated within what Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell have characterised as the Central Province: an area of mostly nucleated settlement stretching from the north-east to the south-west of England across the Midland counties. Drawing on the same framework, Lakenheath sits in the Southeastern Province, which broadly represents a more complex region, demonstrating more diverse settlement patterns.¹⁶ More specifically, Lakenheath straddles the boundaries of the sub-provinces of the Wash (west) and Wash (east), which at this point indicate the limits of fenland and breckland respectively (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.1. Elton, Castor and Lakenheath, based on the Historic Counties, c.1888. Source: Historic County Borders Project (2018) <http://www.county-borders.co.uk>

Figure 1.2. Elton (Huntingdonshire), Castor (Northamptonshire) and Lakenheath (Suffolk). Source: A. Lowerre, E. Lyons, B.K. Roberts and S. Wrathmell, Atlas of rural settlement in England (York, 2015) <https://doi.org/10.5284/1031493>

Elton, Huntingdonshire

Elton lies in the north-west corner of Huntingdonshire, with the river Nene forming both its westernmost boundary and also the county boundary with Northamptonshire (Figure 1.3). Archaeological surveys have demonstrated sites of occupation in Elton from at least the Roman period onward.¹⁷ The earliest recorded spellings of the settlement name – Æþelingtun and Ælintun – dating from the later tenth century, suggest that it was either ‘the prince’s settlement’ or ‘the settlement of a person called Æthel’.¹⁸ Domesday Book records three holdings in Elton – two Ramsey Abbey lands and a further one and a half hides belonging to Peterborough Abbey – and the territory recorded in 1086 seems to have extended to 1,872 acres.¹⁹ An extent dated 1218 indicates that the Peterborough lands had been absorbed into the Ramsey holding by this time.²⁰ Drawn from the Peterborough holding, it is possible to trace the development of a small proto-manor, created between the later twelfth century and 1218, which was held by the de Aylington family.²¹

By this time, Elton was a polyfocal village and parish of 1,896 acres divided into two separate manors: the settlement associated with the main Ramsey manor was at Nether End, close to the river, and the de Aylington manor, alongside its tenant holdings, was situated at Over End.²² Although there were ostensibly two manors only the documentary records for the Ramsey Abbey holdings survive and if the de Aylington family held a separate manorial court in this period there is now no record of it. In addition to holding a manorial court the abbot of Ramsey also held the franchise for the view of frankpledge in Elton, attended by tenants of both manors. The majority of Elton’s resident peasants were servile, and the villein population living on the main manor owed relatively heavy labour services.

The Ramsey manorial records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries emphasise that the abbey’s agrarian activities were focused on arable production. This was typical of many villages in the Central Province and, at this time, Elton’s landscape was probably organised in an open-field system consisting of three fields.²³ In 1279 the Ramsey Abbey demesne comprised three hides, a total of 432 acres.²⁴ The settlement’s riverine location also provided plentiful valuable meadowland: in 1086, a total of 184 acres was recorded.²⁵ An earlier undated survey outlined an agreement between Ramsey Abbey and Thorney Abbey whereby the latter held twenty acres of Elton meadow in exchange for Elton peasants’ right to access pasture for their livestock in Farcet Fen (Huntingdonshire), ten miles to the east.²⁶ The extant surveys make no mention of woodland, and the accounts reveal timber purchased from neighbouring vills.²⁷ The geology consists of an underlying bedrock largely comprising Jurassic limestone of the Cornbrash and Rutland Formations, alongside Jurassic mudstones of Oxford Clay and Whitby Mudstone Formations. Alluvial and terrace soils border the river, while the remainder of the parish consists of clay or lime-rich soils, of which some of the latter are shallow and largely used for sheep pasture in the modern period.²⁸

Figure 1.3. Elton, Huntingdonshire. Source: Ordnance Survey, first edition, rev.

Castor, Northamptonshire

Castor lies five miles due west of Peterborough in the modern county of Cambridgeshire (Figure 1.4). Between at least 1086 and 1888, however, its territory lay within Northamptonshire. At the time of Domesday Book it formed part of the Soke of Peterborough, and was situated within the double hundred of Upton, which later became Nassaburgh hundred.²⁹ Like Elton, it sits on the river Nene, which forms its southernmost boundary and also the county boundary between what was Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire.³⁰ The settlement at Castor has Roman origins, as revealed by its name, ‘the Roman town’, although by the tenth century it was known as Cyneburge cæstre, ‘Cyneburg’s fort’, named for Cyneburg, the daughter of Penda of Mercia, who founded a monastery there in the seventh century (see chapter six).³¹ Archaeological evidence suggests continued occupation from the fifth century onwards, and the selection of the site as an Anglo-Saxon monastic centre attests to its sustained importance.³² In the later medieval period the parish of Castor included four hamlets: Ailsworth, Milton, Upton and Sutton.³³ At that time, Castor and Ailsworth formed one vill, with each township consisting of a number of discrete manors.³⁴

Domesday Book records Peterborough Abbey as tenant-in-chief, directly holding three hides in Castor and six in Ailsworth. After 1066, in order to provide military support to the crown, the abbey created several knights’ fees: three hides in Castor were held by five knights, and an additional three knights held another three hides in Ailsworth. Another two hides were recorded at Milton.³⁵ While little information survives concerning the original knights’ fees, the 1105 Descriptio Militum de Abbatia de Burgo lists one Turold of Castor holding two hides, which Edmund King defines as two fees.³⁶ In c.1133 this was reduced to one and a half hides when the church and its advowson was conveyed to Peterborough Abbey by Turold’s eldest son Richard, who was its priest and wished to become a monk at the abbey.³⁷ The remaining lands were retained by the priest’s younger brother Geoffrey, who held the fee. The descent of the smaller fees is more difficult to determine, but it is possible to detect three small manors in Castor by the thirteenth century. In 1348 the Turold holding remained at one and a half fees.³⁸ Surveys and charters suggest that the remaining hide of land – consisting of two fees – was held by the Illings and the Cordels, each holding one fee.³⁹ Despite forming part of the estate of Peterborough Abbey, lordship appears to have been weaker in Castor than it was in Elton under Ramsey Abbey. A survey of 1321 lists just nine villeins and two free tenants, whereas it appears that the majority of the substantial remaining free population were tenants of one of the smaller manors.⁴⁰

Figure 1.4. Castor, Northamptonshire. Source: Ordnance Survey, first edition, rev.

The parish contains 7,110 acres, which in the modern period included 750 acres of woodland.⁴¹ By the early fourteenth century the Peterborough Abbey demesne consisted of 195 acres of arable land and thirteen and a half acres of meadow.⁴² Although situated in what might appear to be ‘classic’ champion country – characterised by nucleated villages and regular open-field systems supporting predominantly arable agrarian regimes – Castor seems to have been something of an anomaly. There were five open fields in Castor and four in Ailsworth in the late medieval period.⁴³ The landscape was also fairly extensively wooded, with over 400 acres recorded in 1215 prior to the onset of extensive assarting, after which reasonably substantial woodland still remained; there was also a large area of heathland. Castor’s geology is similar to that at Elton, with Jurassic limestone underlying the higher ground; and in the river valley, sandstone, siltstone and mudstone of the Grantham formations is overlain with river terrace deposits of sand and gravel.⁴⁴

Lakenheath, Suffolk

Lakenheath is a large parish of some 11,000 acres in the north-west corner of Suffolk, close to the boundary between Cambridgeshire and Norfolk (Figure 1.5).⁴⁵ The river Little Ouse forms its northernmost boundary, beyond which lies the county of Norfolk. The parish is broadly split between the Fens to the west and the light lands of Breckland to the east. Human activity has been recorded in Lakenheath since the Palaeolithic period, with evidence for settlement continuing from the Iron Age into the Anglo-Saxon period.⁴⁶ The earliest extant mention of the settlement name dates from the early eleventh century, when it was recorded in a late Saxon charter as Lacingahið, ‘the landing place of the people of the stream’, or ‘called after Laca’, the name perhaps indicating the importance of water in the area.⁴⁷ This charter outlines a grant of five hides to Thorney Abbey; by 1086, when five carucates were recorded, Ely Abbey held four (including the township of Undley) and Richard de Clare held the remaining one.⁴⁸ Following the reorganisation of the abbey’s estate in the late twelfth century the former abbatial manor became part of the much smaller Ely Priory estate; and, in 1331, Clare fee was granted to the priory by Elizabeth de Burgh.⁴⁹ Unusually, both lords were designated joint chief lords of the vill, with Ely Priory holding the advowson of the church and the Clares – by then earls of Gloucester – the franchise of the leet court and the right to hold a market.⁵⁰

Somewhat unusually for Suffolk, the village, consisting of a long linear settlement close to the fen edge, was nucleated. Lakenheath’s topography is diverse: to the west lies approximately 7,000 acres of fenland; 2,000 acres of heathland lie to the east; and the arable portion consisted of 1,500 acres, of which the priory’s demesne was c.600 acres and the Clare demesne forty acres.⁵¹ Although no survey survives for the conventual manor, the manorial documents for this period record thirty-one villeins holding 465 acres.⁵² An inquisition post mortem of 1262 indicates that there were 225 acres of villeinage on the Clare fee, although by 1307 this seems likely to have been reduced to 180 acres.⁵³ The remaining small quantity of arable land must have been divided between molmen, smallholders and free tenants.⁵⁴ The fenland supported a large quantity of fisheries, many of which were leased to peasants, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In addition, tenants had rights over certain fenland resources, including peat turves and sedge. The heathland provided extensive pasture, but from 1251 it was also licensed by the prior for the hunting of small game, and in 1300 a warren was established.⁵⁵ Because of its poor soils Lakenheath’s medieval economy was dominated by sheep husbandry, and arable production focused on rye and barley. There were four great fields, which Mark Bailey suggests were probably organised in a shift system, wherein crop rotations were not constrained by fields or furlongs, but ranged more flexibly across the arable land.⁵⁶ Lakenheath’s bedrock geology predominantly consists of chalk, overlain with sand to the east and peat to the west, with river terrace deposits along the fen edge and alluvium in parts of the fenland.⁵⁷

Figure 1.5. Lakenheath, Suffolk. Source: Ordnance Survey, first edition, rev.

As outlined above, these three settlements offer a range of contrasts. While Elton and Castor are both situated within the Central Province, amid its predominantly nucleated villages and arable farming, Castor is less typically ‘champion’ than might be expected, with its appurtenant woodland. Topographically, Lakenheath is again dissimilar, with a greater focus on pastoral husbandry and the exploitation of its fenland resources. Each settlement also has a slightly different social structure. Elton was principally populated by servile individuals, the majority of whom were villeins who owed fairly onerous labour services as part of their rents. Lakenheath was also mainly inhabited by unfree peasants, although the presence of two manors almost certainly meant that the experience of villeins on each manor differed. The records relating to Clare fee do not reveal the extent of peasants’ labour services there, but, with a demesne of just forty acres, they were unlikely to have been particularly burdensome. Conversely, the villeins on the conventual manor were obliged to provide extensive labour services, as the works schedules within the surviving account rolls document. Several disagreements recorded in the court rolls there also indicate that the molmen’s more intermediate status was not always understood by manorial officials. At Castor, however, the majority of its resident peasants were personally free and lived on one of the smaller fees, whose tenants made up the larger part of the settlement’s population, offering an important point of distinction from Elton and Lakenheath – not least because, in studies of English peasant communities, so little is usually known about free tenants.

Sources

The three settlements for this study all have, in addition to the characteristics outlined above, excellent extant documentary material for the period under review. Naturally, there is a wide disparity in survival across the three vills. Whereas there are relatively abundant court and account rolls for both Lakenheath manors and Elton in the period under review, just three account rolls survive for the ecclesiastical manor at Castor.⁵⁸ Conversely, there are several manorial surveys for the main manors at Castor and Elton, but none for Lakenheath. Of the peasant records, a large quantity of late medieval charters survives for Castor. Unlike the manorial documents, these charters were largely produced for peasants associated with the small secular manors. In comparison, there are just sixty for Elton – ordinarily, a large collection – and just a handful within monastic cartularies for Lakenheath. The key sources are listed in Table 1.1. Added to this are a number of crown records of varying quality. Domesday Book provides the first comprehensive outline of each settlement within our period. The hundred rolls survey of 1279 is exceptionally detailed for Elton, yet provides little additional detail for either Castor or Lakenheath. Inquisitions post mortem offer a snapshot into Lakenheath’s Clare fee, but none survive for Castor’s secular manors. A number of later documents pertaining to the landscape were also used – chiefly maps, field books and later surveys. In addition, where possible, material culture has been introduced either to support a specific argument or as a central form of evidence, as is the case with the twelfth-century church capitals at Castor. Specific peculiarities and cautionary notes pertaining to each source type are considered as required within the text.

The central aim of this book is to establish what it might be possible to determine about peasants’ varied relationships with their local environment using the sources that remain to us. As this means drawing upon a wide range of material and interpreting it using methodologies from varied academic disciplines, the results presented focus on a number of inter-related themes, rather than taking the more traditional form of a progressive argument. Care has been taken to concentrate on what the source material selected for this study can reveal, but this necessarily means that some themes – such as religion – remain unexplored. Some material, such as field-names, for example, has to a certain extent been given priority: this is deliberate, as names are one of the very few sources for which a peasant provenance is generally undisputed. If we are to reflect upon the rural environment from the perspective of the later medieval lower orders, then it is vital that – as far as it is possible to do so – we take their worldview into account when we reconsider the sources that reveal something of their lives in rural England. I hope to show that this approach shines a new light on the study of medieval peasant mentalities. Despite the efforts of late medieval elites, peasant experience cannot be diluted to produce a grand narrative that reveals one collective attitude toward the local landscape, even though modern historians frequently treat the peasantry as an aggregated whole. The records of the rural environment reveal – however imperfectly – the multi-faceted relationships between late medieval peasants and the local environments they inhabited and knew intimately.

Table 1.1

Principal documentary sources.

1CUL EDC/7/16/2/1/4/3.

2TNA C 134/42; the value had been decreasing since 1261: TNA C 132/27/5; TNA C 133/129/1.

3Literary and artistic representations of the deliberate separation of lordly resources from the lower orders were not mere constructs of the seigneurial mind. In 1381 resources of this nature were specifically targeted by peasants because of their overt association with lords; R. Liddiard, Castles in context: power, symbolism and landscape, 1066–1500 (Macclesfield, 2005), p. 118.

4S.V. Smith, ‘Towards a social archaeology of the late medieval English peasantry: power and resistance at Wharram Percy’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 9/3 (2009), p. 392. Our European colleagues, perhaps benefiting from more profitable source material, have been ahead of us in this endeavour. See, for example: E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French village, 1294–1324, trans. B. Bray (1978; London, 1990); J.-C. Schmitt, The holy greyhound: Guinefort, healer of children since the thirteenth century,